1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to document recognition. More particularly, this invention relates to methods and systems for the recognition of checks and similar payment instruments.
2. Description of the Related Art
Checks are a common means of payment, and are widely used in retail transactions. Thus, practically every modern store accepts them. In order to process a payment by check, some point-of-sale (POS) terminals are capable of capturing bank account information from the check at the time of purchase. This information is represented by indicia, typically located at the bottom of the check, and known as the code line, which includes the bank's transit number, the customer's bank account number, and the check sequence number. The indicia are readable visually, and are also readable automatically, using well-known optical character recognition (OCR) and magnetic ink character recognition (MICR) techniques.
Due to ink imperfections, even state-of-the-art magnetic readers suffer from significant numbers of misreads—both character substitution errors (over 0.1%) and errors due to unreadable characters (up to 4%). In order to mitigate this problem, MICR may be augmented by OCR. Nevertheless, a significant number of checks are still rejected by automatic recognition systems. These checks must be manually entered into the POS terminal for submission to the payment system, during which, for reasons of security, a cashier keying in the code line information is typically supervised by a store manager. Since code lines tend to be quite long (25-40 characters), manual data entry is tedious and error prone. It is costly in terms of labor, and diverts the manager from other functions. Furthermore, rejection of a customer's check by the automatic recognition system is inconvenient not only to that customer, but also to other customers waiting to be serviced by the cashier. Resultant loss of good will can be significant to the merchant.